A Survey of Physical Layer Security Techniques for 5G Wireless Networks and Challenges Ahead

Physical layer security which safeguards data confidentiality based on the information-theoretic approaches has received significant research interest recently. The key idea behind physical layer security is to utilize the intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to guarantee the security in physical layer. The evolution towards 5G wireless communications poses new challenges for physical layer security research. This paper provides a latest survey of the physical layer security research on various promising 5G technologies, including physical layer security coding, massive multiple-input multiple-output, millimeter wave communications, heterogeneous networks, non-orthogonal multiple access, full duplex technology, etc. Technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends of physical layer security in 5G and beyond are discussed.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication

Secure Transmission with Multiple Antennas II: The MIMOME Wiretap Channel

The capacity of the Gaussian wiretap channel model is analyzed when there are multiple antennas at the sender, intended receiver and eavesdropper. The associated channel matrices are fixed and known to all the terminals. A computable characterization of the secrecy capacity is established as the saddle point solution to a minimax problem. The converse is based on a Sato-type argument used in other broadcast settings, and the coding theorem is based on Gaussian wiretap codebooks. At high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the secrecy capacity is shown to be attained by simultaneously diagonalizing the channel matrices via the generalized singular value decomposition, and independently coding across the resulting parallel channels. The associated capacity is expressed in terms of the corresponding generalized singular values. It is shown that a semi-blind "masked" multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmission strategy that sends information along directions in which there is gain to the intended receiver, and synthetic noise along directions in which there is not, can be arbitrarily far from capacity in this regime. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the secrecy capacity to be zero are provided, which simplify in the limit of many antennas when the entries of the channel matrices are independent and identically distributed. The resulting scaling laws establish that to prevent secure communication, the eavesdropper needs 3 times as many antennas as the sender and intended receiver have jointly, and that the optimimum division of antennas between sender and intended receiver is in the ratio of 2:1.Comment: To Appear, IEEE Trans. Information Theor

Physical layer security for machine type communication networks

Abstract. We examine the physical layer security for machine type communication networks and highlight a secure communication scenario that consists of a transmitter Alice, which employs Transmit Antenna Selection, while a legitimate receiver Bob that uses Maximum Ratio Combining, as well as an eavesdropper Eve. We provide a solution to avoid eavesdropping and provide ways to quantify security and reliability. We obtain closed-form expressions for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output and Multi-antenna Eavesdropper (MIMOME) scenario. The closed{-}form expressions for three useful variations of MIMOME scenario, i.e., MISOME, MIMOSE, and MISOSE are also provided. A low cost and less complex system for utilizing the spatial diversity in multiple antennas system, while guaranteeing secrecy and reliability. Similarly, it is also assumed that Alice, Bob, and Eve can estimate their channel state information, and then we evaluate the performance of closed-form expressions in terms of secrecy outage probability and provide Monte Carlo simulations to corroborate the proposed analytical framework

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Secure Transmission in Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, we consider physical layer security provisioning in multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Specifically, we consider secure downlink transmission in a multi-cell massive MIMO system with matched-filter precoding and artificial noise (AN) generation at the base station (BS) in the presence of a passive multi-antenna eavesdropper. We investigate the resulting achievable ergodic secrecy rate and the secrecy outage probability for the cases of perfect training and pilot contamination. Thereby, we consider two different AN shaping matrices, namely, the conventional AN shaping matrix, where the AN is transmitted in the null space of the matrix formed by all user channels, and a random AN shaping matrix, which avoids the complexity associated with finding the null space of a large matrix. Our analytical and numerical results reveal that in multi-cell massive MIMO systems employing matched-filter precoding (1) AN generation is required to achieve a positive ergodic secrecy rate if the user and the eavesdropper experience the same path-loss, (2) even with AN generation secure transmission may not be possible if the number of eavesdropper antennas is too large and not enough power is allocated to channel estimation, (3) for a given fraction of power allocated to AN and a given number of users, in case of pilot contamination, the ergodic secrecy rate is not a monotonically increasing function of the number of BS antennas, and (4) random AN shaping matrices provide a favourable performance/complexity tradeoff and are an attractive alternative to conventional AN shaping matrices